Probably went back to bed by now. Let's find Barry. I want to see this map you made."
"But what if someone else spots us?"
"Who's gonna see? Other than Barry, there's nobody out there this morning."
"Except for the dead people."
Timmy grinned. "Well, yeah, except for the dead people. They're always there. Wouldn't be a cemetery without them."
"Yeah," Doug agreed. "It would just be a bunch of empty holes in the ground."
Chapter Two
After making sure Barry's parents weren' t watching them from the windows, the boys crossed Golgotha Church Road and wheeled around the church and into the cemetery. To their left, down over the sloping hill, were the old graves. Timmy noted again how two of them had sunk into the ground.
In front of them, sprawling out behind the church, was the more modern portion of the graveyard. This part stretched nearly a quartermile to the west. It was split into three large sections by narrow, cracked blacktop roadways, each barely wide enough for a single car to drive on.
The first road, off to their left, separated the older graveyard at the bottom of the hill from the more modern cemetery above. Halfway along this path was an old yellow clapboard utility shed with a rusty tin roof that was covered with fallen tree branches and leaves. Beyond the shed was another stretch of woods. The boys often played inside the old shed, gaining access, when they didn't have Barry's dad's keys, through a boarded up window at the rear, half hidden by a massive pile of dirt left over from new graves. Inside was a small backhoe, a riding mower, two push mowers, a grass catcher, winch, shovels, rakes, pickaxes, hoes, wooden planks and plywood to cover up open graves, canvas tarps, stone markers, plastic flowers and wreaths, vases for the graves, and little flags for Veteran's and Memorial Days. Because of the dirt floor, it always smelled musty inside. Barry, Doug, and Timmy often waited with their pumpaction BB and pellet guns until a rat or groundhog burrowed up through the floor. Then they'd nail it. Barry especially enjoyed this activity since it was one of the few times his father seemed genuinely pleased with him; they were taking care of the rodents that plagued the graveyard. This morning, the shed 's doors hung open, swaying slightly in the breeze, and the tractor was missingboth signs that Barry had been there earlier.
The path to their right bordered the northern end of the cemetery. On one side were gray and brown tombstones carved from granite and marble. On the other side was a long, sloping pasture in which beef cattle grazed. An electric fence kept the cows from wandering into the graveyard. Last summer, Barry and Doug had dared Timmy to pee on the fence, offering up back issues of ManThing, Defenders, Captain America, and Kamando from their collections, as well as one of Doug 's Micronauts action figures (a blue Time Traveler) and some of Barry's extra Wacky Packages cards. It was a hard deal to turn down, especially because Timmy collected Defenders and it was an issue he didn't havethe one where Hulk, Dr. Strange, Valkyrie, Nighthawk and the rest of the team fought a villain called Nebulon, and Chondu the Mystic possessed the Hulk's pet fawn. So, steeling himself, he'd peed on the fence, got the shock of his life, and had endured two days of not being able to sit down comfortably along with the jeers of his two best friends. His testicles had turned black and blue, and after returning from the doctor's office, his parents had grounded him for two weeks. By that time, it didn 't matter. Admitting to his parents what he' d done had been, until that point, the most mortifyingly embarrassing moment of Timmy Graco 's life.
And it had totally been worth it.
At the bottom of the hill, beyond the lush, rolling pasture, was a small hollow with a thin stream running through it' s center, emptying into a deep pond, complete with diving board, boat dock, and a tire swing hanging from a drooping willow tree. Next to the pond stood Luke Jones ' s threestory farmhouse and a long barn, both white with green tiled roofs. Several other outbuildings sat clustered around the two larger structures. The view beyond the farm was clear for miles and miles the paper mill' s stacks belching white smoke into the sky, the twin towns of Colonial Valley and Spring Grove, and in the distance, on the horizon, the forested tops of Pigeon Hills and the radio transmitter tower for 98YCR nestled among them. On a quiet day, visitors to the cemetery could hear the distant whine of traffic on Route 116, which cut through Spring Grove and passed by Colonial Valley on its way to Hanover and Gettysburg. The far end of the cemetery was bordered by a cornfield, which bridged the pasture to the side with the older graveyard, shed, and vast forest beyond them. It was at the intersection of the cemetery, cornfield, and the electric fence that the boys had built the Dugout. It sat only a few feet away from the blacktopped cemetery path, invisible to passersby (except, apparently, Timmy's grandfather), and the electric fence skirted the fort's far edge. They weren' t sure whose property it was on, the churches or Mr. Jones
'sand in truth, they' d never stopped to consider it. At twelve, they saw all of the area as theirs, and begrudged the adults their usage of it. Had Timmy been able to figure out a way to tax all the grownups for their usage of the surrounding countryside, he 'd have happily done it.
They rode down the pathway, searching for Barry. The smell of fresh cut grass hung thick in the air. A bird chirped happily overhead. White and yellow butterflies hovered over a puddle leftover from the rainstorm two days before. Honeybees buzzed in a patch of clover.
As he pedaled, Timmy watched the gravestones flash past; sarah myers 19001929; abby luckenBAUGH 19221923; BRITNEY RODGERS, AGE 5; BRETT SOWERS 19131983, WWII VETERAN, KENNETH L. RUDISill 19231976. He'd spent so much time amongst these markers that the names and dates were as familiar as the kids in his class. A lot of the people buried here were children, many of them infants, many more around his age. That had always disturbed him. Timmy normally felt immortal, like the Eternals, another of his favorite comic books. He didn 't like to think about the alternativethat somebody his age could die. But here was proof, carved in stone, that it happened all the time that kids his age died. His grandmother was buried in this section as well. Timmy didn' t remember her very well, just vague impressions. Her perfume, the way she 'd always tried to get him to eat more when they visited, how she' d squeezed him when they hugged. He often had to look at photographs just to remember her face. Next to her gravestone was a matching marker for his grandfather; Dane Graco' s name and date of birth were already engraved in the marble, just waiting on his death to complete the inscription. Timmy didn 't like to think about that either, and as a result, he avoided his grandmother' s grave whenever possible. Seeing his grandfather 's name along with that blank date, as if the stone were just waiting for Dane Graco, gave Timmy the creeps. Behind them, five archshaped stained glass windows on the rear of the church stared out, overseeing the cemetery. They' d also always given Timmy the creeps. Often on Sunday mornings, when the sermon was especially boring, he'd stare at the windows and make up spooky stories about the scenes depicted in them.
Sometimes he even wrote them down in the margins of his church bulletin, much to his mother ' s chagrin. She told him it was disrespectful, bordering on blasphemous. Timmy didn 't understand that. The Bible was full of scary stories and characterswitches and black magic, zombies and demons, giants and sea monsters, murder, even cannibalism. Why were his little tales any worse? Why wouldn 't God like them? He told some of the stories to Barry and Doug, and they' d asked him for more. Their eagerness had inspired something inside Timmy. He thought that when he grew up, he might like to write comic books. Not draw them, of course.